A Home, Not Jail, For Now

Freedom Project Helps Mentally Ill Homeless

November 30, 2009|By Lisa J. Huriash Staff Writer

FORT LAUDERDALE — Richard Byrnes said he didn't mean any harm. He said he knows when he stops taking his medication for bipolar disorder he gets into trouble. But he just wanted so badly to stop taking drugs.

So the 29-year-old former barber took a chance. Again. He stopped his meds, setting off an immediate downward spiral that left him homeless, on the streets, scrounging around for marijuana and crack cocaine.

Police picked him up the day he spent hanging around the bus depot in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Byrnes could have been arrested for trespassing and hauled to jail. Instead, the officer dropped him off at the Freedom Project, a new housing program run by Broward County and Henderson Mental Health Center.

Staffed by nurses, case managers and coordinators, the program provides short-term housing for mentally ill people who have been picked up for minor, nonviolent crimes such as petty theft, loitering or trespassing. It takes the place of jail intake until clients can be moved to homeless shelters or half-way houses, helped to find an apartment if they have income, or reunited with family.

"It's a blessing. I could have gone to jail," Byrnes said. "In jail they don't treat you with respect. They treat you like a human being here."

On Monday, five days after he arrived at the Freedom Project house, Byrnes checked out to be reunited with his relatives.

"We don't call them clients," said Pamela Galan, chief operating officer for Henderson. "We call them by their names."

The 1,900-square-foot house off Powerline Road and south of Commercial Boulevard, purchased in October for $103,000, has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and can accommodate at least six residents. The facade looks like every other modest house on the block.

There are healthy snacks in the kitchen, and clients eat three meals a day in the Florida room/den with its brown microfiber sofa and flat-screen television. The garage has been transformed into the administrative office with surveillance cameras. There is even a laundry room for residents to wash their clothes. What was the living room is now intake.

The budget for the next two years is $1.7 million, paid for by the county and state, to cover staff salaries and benefits. Within that budget is almost $41,000 a year for clients' food and clothes, $16,288 for medications, and $26,400 for utilities and home maintenance.

Coral Springs police picked up resident Evans Jeannite, 30, when it looked like he was going to swipe a CD player from a store. "I'm homeless, I don't have money to eat, so I have to take things," he said. "It's not something I'm proud of."

He said he hopes to eventually move to a homeless shelter so he can get back on his feet. He said he's relieved to be getting help: "I don't have to be outside every day."

Steve Werthman, administrator for the county's Homeless Initiative Partnership, said the program's short-term goal is to prove its cost-effectiveness.

"Jails and prisons have become the largest providers of mental health care," he said. "That shouldn't be."

Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein said there should have been Freedom Project houses years ago.

"If we had more of them we could empty out the jails," he said. "It's about time that the police and the prosecutors opened their eyes and realize these are sick people, not criminals, and treat them accordingly. Don't take somebody in the throes of mental illness, arrest them, make the taxpayer pay for their incarceration and prosecution, when they needed medical treatment."

"Take them to a sanctuary, not only because it's the right thing to do," Finkelstein said. "It's the economic thing to do as well."

Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sunsentinel.com or 954-572-2008.